MORE TO BEGBIE THAN HANGINGS, LAWYERS ARGUE
The ghost of pioneering B.C. justice Sir Matthew Begbie — the Hanging Judge to some — has come back to haunt the Law Society of B.C.
The professional regulator’s benchers this spring unanimously exorcised from its lobby a statue of the legendary chief judge.
And they scrubbed references to him from the society’s image, noting it’s offensive to Indigenous people.
But the colonial-era jurist who brought law and order to the two colonies that were the cornerstones of the province has not gone quietly into that good night.
And the decision to disown Begbie may yet prove to be just as controversial as moves in the U.S. to remove public symbols of the Confederacy or East Coast attempts to eliminate memorials of Halifax founder Edward Cornwallis, who issued a bounty on Indigenous people.
The profession’s blue-chip journal, The Advocate, has rallied to the defence of the province’s first chief justice.
In its unsigned editorial column entitled Entre Nous — Between Us, the august publication this month says the move is “perhaps even a step in the wrong direction — than a purposeful and reasoned step toward reconciliation.”
“By removing the Begbie statue from the Law Society lobby, our governing body is now telling us that Begbie’s legacy has but a single dimension which is antithetical to truth and reconciliation,” asserts the magazine that goes to every lawyer in the province.
It added: “With great respect to the intentions of the parties, we think the recommendation to remove the Begbie statue and the acceptance of that recommendation are both misguided. … We fear that the rush to reconciliation has trampled a principled approach with one unintended consequence being estrangement rather than reconciliation of interested parties.”
Editor Michael Bain said many lawyers have told him they want the society to revisit the issue, as it was forced to do over its initial approval of a law school at Trinity Western University.
“I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations and a lot of reaction to it,” the Vancouver lawyer said. “It has definitely struck a nerve ... and the impact of it happening on the profession, I think, has been to give people pause as to what the benchers are doing or how they are doing it.”
Published by the Vancouver Bar Association since 1943, the magazine’s masthead bears a who’s who of the profession — Christopher Harvey, Q.C., David Roberts, Q.C., Court of Appeal Justice Mary Saunders, Peter J. Roberts and Provincial Court Judge William F.M. Jackson.
The editorial acknowledged a certain anxiety about wading in on the issue “but just as the first tentative steps into the ice-cold mountain lake can result in a terrified skip back up the slope, usually it is the icy plunge itself that yields the better reward.”
It then proceeds to kick the intellectual stuffing out of the society’s decision — citing the historical record to show the renowned legalist was ahead of his time and a supporter of Indigenous people.
A Cambridge-educated Chancery barrister and member of Lincoln’s Inn, Begbie arrived in what is now B.C. in 1858 at the age of 39.
“He learned a number of Indigenous dialects and even conducted trials in those languages. He had great friendships with a number of chiefs … he was clearly sympathetic when it came to trying to impose colonial law on Indigenous people. He recognized the concept of Aboriginal marriage and allowed an oath for truth-telling that recognized Aboriginal beliefs. In fact, he was surprisingly enlightened for a 19th-century Englishman when it came to understanding and interacting with Aboriginal peoples.”
Nevertheless, the Law Society indicted Begbie for presiding over four trials in which six of nine accused Tsilhqot’in warriors were convicted by juries for murdering white road-builders.
Indigenous people have long insisted the executed chiefs were freedom fighters protecting traditional territories from the encroachment of settlers. Moreover, the chiefs surrendered only after threats to slaughter Indigenous women and children.
In 1993, the NDP attorney general apologized for the hangings and in 2014 Liberal premier Christy Clark confirmed the exoneration of the chiefs.
“The whole affair seems quite unseemly — indeed, Begbie’s contemporaneous writings reveal his decided unease about the outcome — but we are still trying to grasp what it is that Begbie did wrong,” the editorial maintains. “He did not pass judgment himself but he did pronounce the mandatory sentence as the law required him to do.”
There is another Begbie icon outside the New Westminster courthouse and three mountains, two lakes, a creek, an elementary school, streets and other sites across B.C. bear his name.
The society made its decision to erase Begbie without consulting the membership, though it noted many lawyers would disagree with the move.
“I’m not sure it’s the proper road towards reconciliation, in my view,” Bain said. “I would have thought more dialogue would have been helpful rather than less.”